Even given this memoir's limited ambitions -- it is not a full-fledged autobiography but a meditation on the author's early struggles to make a living -- there is something undernourished about it. It's not just the author's flat-footed prose; it's his refusal to give us the sort of color, insight and emotional detail that might transform his narrative into something more than a series of anecdotes strung like pop beads along a theme. Mr. Auster skims over the role his conflicted feelings about his parents' divorce played in shaping his attitude toward money, and he completely ignores the role his destitution played in the breakdown of his marriage.

The reader gets no real sense of Mr. Auster's relationship with his parents, his ex-wife or his son, no real understanding, for that matter, of his own personality other than that he wanted to be a writer, glamorized the idea of failure and had deeply ambivalent feelings about money. Mr. Auster's reticence on these matters seems motivated less by a conscious desire to withhold secrets than by a writerly obsession with compression and concision. Indeed many fascinating stories in this book are curiously brushed off in asides. Mr. Auster's observation that he once knew 7 of the F.B.I.'s 10 most wanted men -- this was in 1969, when student radicalism was at its height -- is tossed away in a sentence. And his encounters in Mexico with a ''man who threatened to kill me'' and a ''schizophrenic girl who thought I was a Hindu god'' are consigned to a parenthetical mention.